Jonathan Penrose
Number of games in database: 394
Years covered: 1950 to 1995
Last FIDE rating: 2405
Overall record: +153 -94 =147 (57.5%)*
* Overall winning percentage = (wins+draws/2) / total games
Based on games in the database; may be incomplete.

(Dr.) Jonathan Penrose was born in Colchester, England.
Awarded the IM title in 1961, the IMC title in 1980, the GMC title in 1983 and an Emeritus GM title. He was British Champion a record ten times and also London Champion in 1949. Tournament stress forced him to take up correspondence chess in preference to over-the-board play in the early 1970's.
He is the son of Lionel Sharples Penrose and his doctorate is in psychology. His brothers are Oliver Penrose and noted author and physicist Roger.

ray keene: i have <wmd> on my ignore list so have voluntarily deprived myself of his insights. i have no idea if he is really <david levy> .

re penrose-he is an otb and corr gm. he won the british championship ten times and of course beat larsen tal robatsch hartston wade and a host of other strong players. winning the british championship ten times ought to have been enough to get the gm title but in those days the rules were odd as lawrence day has pointed out. some events just didnt count for titles and the british championship-even tho packed with people who had beaten gligoric tolush bronstein szabo yanofsky botvinnik bogolyubov tartakower smyslov euwe etc etc simply did not count!! after penroses collapse in 1974 at nice -which i have reported on elsewhere-he was a shadow of his former self and the bcf had to apply for his title retrospectively.

technical draw: Incredible. Penrose wins the British Championship 10 times then quits OTB play because of tournament stress. I play one game in a tournament and I'm a wreck. I'm with IMDay, beating Tal in his prime is enough for the GM title.

Ron: Well I got the first two white moves right, and after checking my answer, there seems to be a wonderfully clever third move....

Jonathan Penrose seems to be a player who had great talent for the game who, had he devoted his life to chess, might have reached the super-elite; but he had other interests, and did not have the support of a State some others had.

Just got his book "The Road to Reality : A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe". 1050 pages of things long mostly long forgotten or never learned. What would be easier going, that or the Feynman Lectures?

jerseybob: Of course Penrose was a GM in strength, if not title. Just go into back issues of the BCM from the 60s, play over the games and enjoy the artistry. But many American players have fallen into the same FIDE Catch-22 down through the years: to get a title you must play titled players.

GrahamClayton: <WMD>According to the Oxford Companion, '...In the early 1970s he further restricted his chess because the stress of over-the-board play adversely affected his health'

WMD,
I read in a recent chess column that Penrose collapsed at the board during the England v Andorra match at the 1970 Olympiad at Seigen. I think that this incident helped in his decision to scale back his OTB play.

Richard Taylor: Is Penrose related to the famous physicist-cosmologist?

I've seen Penrose's name over the years going back to the 60s...he was always in the top grades in England from memory.

He had some kind of nervous collapse?

Be interesting to hear more about that - the human side of chess... while playing a chess game I find I play better under "stress" and with adrenalin but also if the stress too much I freak and stuff the game up. Need to get the happy medium as they call it in the trade.

Quite a lot of suicides in chess - quite few even just in my own club (Auckland, NZ) over the years! Chess attracts nutters though..wont name anyone! But there is that "old retired Russian guy"! And all those strange British Gm(s)! And others of course...

IndigoViolet: <Galton also originated the phrase “nature versus nurture,” which still reverberates in debates today. (It was probably suggested by Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” in which Prospero laments that his slave Caliban is “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick.”) At Cambridge, Galton had noticed that the top students had relatives who had also excelled there; surely, he reasoned, such family success was not a matter of chance. His hunch was strengthened during his travels, which gave him a vivid sense of what he called “the mental peculiarities of different races.” Galton made an honest effort to justify his belief in nature over nurture with hard evidence. In his 1869 book “Hereditary Genius,” he assembled long lists of “eminent” men—judges, poets, scientists, even oarsmen and wrestlers—to show that excellence ran in families. To counter the objection that social advantages rather than biology might be behind this, he used the adopted sons of Popes as a kind of control group. His case elicited skeptical reviews, but it impressed Darwin. “You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense,” he wrote to Galton, “for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work.” Yet Galton’s labors had hardly begun. If his eugenic utopia was to be a practical possibility, he needed to know more about how heredity worked. His belief in eugenics thus led him to try to discover the laws of inheritance. And that, in turn, led him to statistics.>

Abdel Irada: Apparently context makes all the difference. On this chess site, I note that Roger Penrose (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_...) gets relatively short shrift; and yet, if we were to look elsewhere, we would find the latter more honored than the rest of his family combined.

When, for example, the surreal artist M.C. Escher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MC_Esc...) set out to create the impossible structures that animated so many of his works, he based them on Penrose' "impossible tribar": a two-dimensional representation of the three-dimensional "triangle" formed by joining three slats of wood at *right angles*; if this "triangle" really existed, its angles would add up to 270 degrees.

A little thing, and completely artificial, this irreal "triangle." But from it rose the quasi-infinite architecture of a mental cosmos of impossible structures now familiar to all: "Waterfall," "Ascending and Descending," "Belvedere": All these and more depend for their illusory existence upon Penrose' tribar.

My daughter is a graphic/electronic artist, and when she was very young (three or four), she was simultaneously fascinated by the very childish (the Hundred Acre Wood and all its denizens) and the surreal. For some two years, the "model" for much of her own art was a synthesized figure: "Piglet T. Penrose."

Nosnibor: Tal called Penrose an interesting player after his lossto him at the 1960 Olympiad.When I was a young player many moons ago!Penrose was one of my favourite players.The bio given to him ,bearing in mind he was made an emiritus G.M. is woefully inadequate.He was London Boys Champion in 1948 and 1949 winning it for the first time at the age of 14.He was barely 16 when he won the London Championship with 5.5 out of 7 points ahead of V Berger and Wheatcroft on 5 points.That same year he played for the first time in the British Cmampionship and scored 5/11. A very respectanble score for someone only aged 15.His elder brother Oliver scored 6/11.Attached is the 5th round game from the London Championship of 1949 which does not figure in the db.White:J Penrose,Black: B Reilly,Staunton Gambit 1d4 f5,2e4 fxe4,3Nc3 Nf6,4Bg5 d6,5f3 e3,6Bd3 e6,7Bxe3 Be7,8Qe2 Nc6,9f4 Nb4,10Bc4 0-0,11a3 Nbd5,12Bd2 c6,13Nf3 b5,14Bd3 Qb6,150-0 Bd7,16Kh1 Rae8,17Rad1 a6,18Ne4 Nxe4,19Qxe4 Nf6,20Qe2 Nd5,21Qe4 Nf6,22Qe2 Nd4,23Ng5! Bxg5,24fxg5 g6,25Qe4 Qd8,26Qh4 Rxf1+,27Rxf1 Rf8,28Rxf8+ Qxf8,29Qg3 Nc7,30h4 Ne8,31Bf4 Kg7,32c3 Kg8,33Kg1 Ng7,34Bxd6 Nf5,35Bxf8 Nxg3,36Bc5 Nf5,37Kf2 Kf7,38g4 Ng7,39Kf3 Ne8,40Kf4 Nc7,41c4 e5+,42Kxe5 Bxg4,43d5 cxd5,44cxd5 Bd1,45b4 Bg4,46Bd4 Black resigns 1-0 A remarkably mature effort by such a young player!

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